It’s taken eight years and seven albums for White Hills to achieve this: cruising altitude. The group’s latest full-length, So You Are… So You’ll Be, arrives on the heels of 2012’s Frying on This Rock; in place of the seething riffage leader David W. has been stoking lately, So You Are tacks toward cooler climes. It’s an interesting direction for the band to take. At its best, like 2011’s H-p1, White Hills' devotion to rock’n’roll of the intergalactic variety is fueled by the urgency of ritual abandon, a heart-pounding, pants-wetting chant in fuzz-pedal form. So You Are's surfaces are not as gloriously scummy.
Turns out that White Hills clean up pretty nicely. That’s “clean” in the relative sense. “In Your Room” pummels and whispers simultaneously, a Dalek nursery rhyme spiked with cyborg call-and-response. The drone-propelled “Forever in Space (Enlightened)” picks up the pace, but there’s a flat-line sameness that supersedes White Hills’ avowed homogeneity. So You Are’s three long instrumentals-- “The Internal Monologue”, “Rare Upon The Earth”, and “MIST (Winter)"-- are full of simulated seagull cries and new-age waterfalls, slabs of padding that swallow and obscure the album to the point where the more energetic tracks feel like the interludes. These are bland turns for a group that usually packs so much kinetic cut-and-thrust.
Still, there’s plenty of So You Are worth sinking teeth into, including the title track, which shows White Hills’ ability to do away with distended, faux-epic intros and just jump straight into the guts of the jam. “In Your Room”'s refreshingly sloppy drum rolls are used to strong effect, but an incessant sequence of sci-fi raygun noises wears out its welcome a quarter of the way through. And the screeching, minimalist breakdown at the end gets points for being the antithesis of the wild-guitar freakout, but it only adds more empty atmosphere to an album top-heavy with it. The pointless snippets of electronic bleepery, “InWords” and “OutWords,” don’t help.
It isn’t just a matter of volume. There’s a bestial snarl to White Hills that’s mostly missing, and nothing’s rushing in to replace it. Occasionally a hint of shoegaze filigree or kosmische bliss gets drawn into the swirl, but it’s not enough. White Hills sound best when every instrument is dialed up to “bruising” just before the control panel melts. That rarely happens here, so there are entire dimensions of texture and harmonic overload that haunt the disc with their absence.
